game freak

it’s finally happened. after five generations of pokemon games, i finally evolved as a pokemon player and actually learned about training pokemon for competitive battles AND caught my very own shinies — 4 of them!

i should backtrack a bit. although i’ve played through all the main games in the pokemon series and i played through the storyline of pokemon y, as with diamond and pearl i picked up my copy of pokemon y again a couple months ago after a long hiatus because my nephew was playing through it and he wanted to trade. i started off doing most of the main post-game quests, including finding all the mega stones (only available from 8 to 9 p.m. each day, an odd design choice), catching all the legendaries, and catching pokemon in the friend safari (more on that later). i also tried out all the features i’d ignored during my original playthrough, including pokemon amie (the game’s nintendogs-like features) and the pokémon global link, which is the website that you can link your game to in order to, among other things, see stats and view medals (i.e. achievements) earned from your game and play simple mini-games to earn items to transfer back to your game.

pokemon amie turned out to be fairly entertaining and cute, and the mini-games were pretty fun overall, although there’s a mini game that makes use of the 3DS’s camera that requires you to literally make faces at your pokemon. getting that mini game to trigger in the first place is tricky as the lighting requirements seem finicky at best and the facial recognition seems a bit spotty (tip: try looking more directly at the camera at the top of your 3DS’s top screen, and try moving your face closer and further away from the screen in order to get it to recognize your expression), but when it does work it’s pretty fun. earning medals got to be a mini-obsession, although the two global link mini-games you earn items from seem to be completely luck-based which is somewhat annoying and much more simplistic than the previous generation (gen V’s) website features.

which brings me to super training. super training is the 3rd of the 3 bottom-screen modes, and it’s a way to train up your critters for competitive battling by playing a simple touch-controlled exercise involving tapping the screen to hit “punching bags”, and a set of mini-games involving shooting balls at targets. i’d never been able to get into EV training, but the mini-game got me interested and the ability to easily see your ‘mon’s EV distributions got me hooked (although the game doesn’t show you the actual EVs in each category, it does provide a graph-based view that is more or less sufficient). the game omits the in-depth explanation of EVs, but the info is easy enough to find online, and now i’m pretty well-versed in EV-enhancing hold items (e.g. power items and braces) and pokerus, EV-enhancing consumable items (e.g. vitamins and wings), EV-reducing berries, and wild pokemon battles for EVs (and so now i finally see the benefit of horde encounters which otherwise were just a nuisance). getting into competitive training has really opened up the depth of pokemon and has made me appreciate the series more than before.

to complement EV training, i also got fairly obsessive about getting pokemon with perfect IVs (e.g. born with the strongest possible stats). most of the recent games include an IV judge in the post game who will tell you what perfect IVs your pokemon has, if any. on top of that the game includes the aforementioned friend safari, places corresponding to people in your friend list (whether or not they even own the game) where you can catch pokemon, many of which aren’t available in the main game, and that are guaranteed to have perfect IVs in two of the six stats. not to mention wonder trading (random trades online), where people often trade away near-perfect pokemon. although i ended up only fully training a few pokemon, with this entry the series has really lowered the bar so that people can build up teams with much less effort, although it’s definitely not a trivial amount.

on top of making training pokemon easier, the game has made finding shinies easier than ever as well. the poke radar returns from previous games, and the game introduces chain fishing, whereby repeatedly fishing in the same spot without any misses will increase your chances of reeling in a shiny. i did try using the poke radar method, but it ended up being too much work, but chain fishing proved to be so easy to do that i caught my first two shinies in one morning, two shiny skrelp. i caught my other two completely randomly from the friend safari (a lillipup and a beautifly) which apparently also has a much higher shiny encounter rate than normal.

[sidebar: for anyone who cares, apparently the rates of finding a shiny are:

about 1 in 8192 normally

about 1 in 1365 using the masuda method (hatch eggs from two parents from different languages)

about 1 in 512 from the the friend safari

about 1 in 240 for poke radar and chain fishing

and all the above rates halved if you have the shiny charm (received by capturing all 700+ pokemon in the national pokedex, excluding event pokemon]

it was pretty cool to finally have caught some shinies of my very own, although i’ll be really psyched once i find one in the regular wild. [thanks also to my dutch pal for giving me two awesome shinies, and his awesome sister to adding two more on top of that!!!] it still astounds me to the length that people will go to catch shinies, which are literally just rare palette swaps, but they are fun to have.

along with training and hunting shinies, i also completed seeing all the entries in the first of the three kalos pokedexes (each having about 150 entries). the global trade system and trading with “passersby” (people playing the game at the same time as you) makes completing your ‘dex easier than ever, although because of the bajillion pokemon available now you’ll be juggling a combination of levelling up and evolving, breeding, and trading to “catch ’em all”. there were many more pokemon than ever before that required breeding to get which was somewhat annoying, but they were easy enough to trade for so it wasn’t that big a deal. [a second shout-out: huge thanks to the random german girl who for pretty much no reason gifted me with a japanese mew, dialga, and a celebi. you’re awesome!]

as you can surmise, i ended up spending waaaay too much time obsessing over pokemon for the last couple of months. i hope now that i’ve done some competitive battles, have some shinies, and have finished one of the kalos pokedexes that i’ll be able to keep my pokemon time down to more manageable levels. the thing that ended up curbing my enthusiasm somewhat is playing some ranked battles online and realizing that the vast majority of people were using the same twenty or so pokemon. seeing the same pokemon over and over again got old fast (earthquake = most overused move ever!) and unlike games like fire emblem the majority of pokemon don’t have high enough stats to be truly competitive. i found that competing against the CPU in the battle maison was much more satisfying, not just because it didn’t require having top-tier pokemon but because there was much more variety in the opponents. i’ll probably continue to experiment with teams via the battle maison and try them out in ranked battles. i also just found out that you can save teams that you’ve battled in game or online to fight in practice rounds via the vs. recorder, which looks like yet another cool feature to play around with.

my second look at pokemon x and y has made me realize how jam-packed the game truly is, and my total play time has rocketed up to more than 150 hours, way higher than most other games i’ve played, period. the game provides a range of satisfying, interlinked goals, with a host of OCD-inducing details, stats, and trivia, that reminds me of my beloved fire emblem series, high praise indeed. the game has impressed me so much this time around that i’ve moved it up from my original ranking to my “greatest games of all time” list, the third pokemon game to make it to the upper echelon. it will be fascinating to see how subsequent games will attempt to top this one, and i’m looking forward to playing the one that manages to do so.

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since i’m more or less caught up with the pokemon series, i was ready to jump on pokemon x and y (on 3DS) pretty soon after they released. i was intrigued by one of the games’ biggest selling points, namely mega evolutions, and the promise of new critters to discover, inc. what i had already decided was going to be my starter of choice, froakie. i was also looking forward to seeing how the series would evolve, although i wasn’t expecting a whole lot, 3-D graphics and new fairy type notwithstanding.

to skip to the punchline, overall i enjoyed the game, but as expected, in terms of the core experience it didn’t feel terribly revolutionary. in other words, it should come as no surprise that you’re still a young trainer tasked with becoming pokemon champion and travelling around a new region collecting eight gym badges before tackling the elite four and the champion, while being distracted by the shenanigans of a group of miscreants, in this case, team flare. there weren’t a huge number of new pokemon, although i did a pretty good job of avoiding spoilers so it was fun to stumble upon them. the game has an interesting setup in terms of the pacing because the new pokemon are spread out over the course of the whole adventure, but the game itself is packed full of pokemon, so much so that the kalos pokedex is divided into three groups, for a total of more than 450 pokemon native to the region. this is a huge number, and so just going through the game at my usual pace there were plenty of pokemon that i completely missed simply b/c i didn’t spend enough time in a particular area. this makes trading, and wonder trading (in which you exchange pokemon randomly with someone else online) more worthwhile than it would be otherwise, and it also makes hunting down rarer pokemon more fun b/c there are more pokemon to discover while you’re searching for a specific one.

one of the things i enjoyed about other entries in the series was the introduction of new forms (baby forms or evolutions) for familiar pokemon, but there weren’t any in this game, no doubt b/c of the mega evolutions. i was disappointed that the majority of the mega evolutions are confined to the post-game, and not only that but there’s no easy way you’d find them all without using a guide, plus there are quite a few that are version exclusive. i suppose i’ll try to track them down some day, but i’m not in any hurry. i found the mega evolutions designs to be kind of same-y, but some of them were more memorable, although i have to say i’m disappointed that of the three original starters only charizard received two mega evolutions (although i’m guessing that the other two will receive alternate forms in the inevitable pokemon Z). not being a hardcore trainer it’s not completely obvious to me if the addition of mega evolutions has broken the balance, but i’m guessing the creators have made sure that it hasn’t. speaking of hardcore training, i didn’t spend any time with the new nintendogs-esque pokemon-amie features or the mini-games, but i’m sure the addition of easier ways to EV train pokemon has made many elite trainers happy.

the 3-D models were great to see in a handheld title (although having played such console pokemon games as pokemon colosseum on gamecube not to mention pokemon battle revolution on wii the experience wasn’t completely novel), although i was disappointed that the actual glasses-free 3-D effects were limited to battles and a handful of areas within the game. as it is, at times the battle scenes had significant slowdown, and while i appreciate the developers wanting to squeeze every last drop out of the 3DS’s hardware, i would’ve preferred they scaled things back a bit to make it run more smoothly.

in terms of other tweaks, the biggest pluses were changes related to gaining exp., namely, the change to gain experience for capturing equal to the amount you would’ve gotten defeating a pokemon, and the change to the exp. share item, which now gives exp. to all the pokemon in your party instead of just the one holding the item. these end up being significant changes b/c you can much more-easily train your pokemon so that in general it becomes easier to get to level 50 and level 100 (the levels used for competitive play), and you can also train more critters, giving you more incentive to experiment instead of relying on your core party of 6. the other minor addition i ended up really appreciating was the addition of roller skates, which provide a means of locomotion that’s faster than running shoes, but more useful than the bike. a relatively minor tweak, but one that i was thankful for every time i played.

the addition of horde and sky battles were more minor inconveniences than new experiences. O-powers (i.e. online powers) are this game’s version of B&W‘s “pass powers” and provided me with a way to save on buying HP-restoring items but were otherwise not particularly essential. another convenience was being able to trade at any time rather than only at poke centers, and although i’m kind of sad that the GTS has returned to its no-frills state and gen V’s dream world is no more, given how obsessively i played on the dream world this is actually a plus in terms of gaining part of my life back.

this post is more detailed than usual, but it makes sense since the series has long been about minor evolutions in the form of continual refinements as opposed to revolutionary new features. the biggest change, mega evolutions, is a nice diversion and a clever way to set up years and years of new designs for the whole menagerie of pokemon, but being mostly limited to the post-game it wasn’t really a “game changer”. i was certainly happy to keep current and play through the latest installment, and it could be that i end up spending more time exploring the competitive aspects of the game since they’ve made it easier than ever to get into “super training”. given my astoundingly huge backlog i won’t be getting into that any time soon, but it’s in the back of my mind so we’ll see. anyway, this is certainly one of the best entries in the series yet, but as usual i’m left feeling tolerably satisfied with the new features and very curious about how the series will evolve further.

[for anyone curious, my final team was comprised of: greninja, charizard Y, vivillon, goodra, aegislash, and florges. as you’d expect, greninja and aegislash did all the heavy lifting, but thanks to the new and improved exp. share my pokemon were all at a pretty high level by the time i got to the end (their levels were in the low 70’s) so the elite 4 and champion weren’t particularly challenging. i did train up malamar (who has the single coolest evolution method yet and, incidentally, always makes me think of those marshmallow cookies), but i ended up ditching it and using charizard Y instead just so i could play around with mega evolutions.]

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although some people may be deep into pokemon rumble u, which was released a few weeks ago, i’m a bit behind and only just recently played through the main mode of the first game in the side series, pokemon rumble on wiiware. unlike thruspace, also on wiiware, which had a demo that was much less satisfying than the actual game, in the case of pokemon rumble the demo tells you pretty much exactly what the full game is like: repetitive and monotonous. the pokemon series has had more than its fair share of mediocre spin-offs, but this one ranks pretty low. you navigate your “toy” pokemon through a series of stages that have the same layouts but with different skins (such as a forest, a cave, a fire stage, a water stage, etc.) and battle waves of other toy pokemon. the toys come with one or two moves and don’t level up, so you’ll be constantly replacing your current main character as you go along. although there is a range of moves that the pokemon may have, mostly influencing the trajectory of their attacks, they don’t make much of a difference and don’t require you to modify your mindless button-mashing strategy much. similarly, some pokemon you pick up may have special abilities, but they aren’t needed since the attack and defense stats dominate; type advantages play a similarly minor role.

not a whole lot more to say about this one. at $15 the game is fairly overpriced for what will only take a few hours to play through. beating the main mode, which features generation I pokemon, unlocks an “advanced” mode that features the generation IV pokemon but otherwise looks like is exactly the same. it’s kind of surprising that the developers felt that this gameplay justified two sequels, one on 3DS and one on the wii u eshop, but in the latter case a game that cashes in, in even a small way, on the huge success of the recent skylanders games is an all too obvious way to rake in some major bucks. this experience has made me highly disinclined to play either of them, but completionist that i am i’m sure i’ll be picking up the 3DS entry eventually.

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one more bit of fluff before i return to slightly more-serious fare. i’d found the free pokedex 3D app on 3DS to be an entertaining diversion, esp. as a complement to the pokemon black and white games, and i thought it would be interesting to try out the “pro” version not because it expands its entries to include all 649 of those little monstas, but because it includes quizzes in a variety of categories as an additional feature. along with the TV series’ “who’s that pokemon” test where you have to name a pokemon based on its silhouette, the game also includes quizzes on pretty much everything pokedex-related you could think of, including evolutions, alternate formes, heights and weights, egg groups, stats, abilities, moves, and cries. identifying cries was one of the more-difficult tasks and has led me to a renewed appreciation of the work that went into them, although being able to match moves to pokemon ended up being the one area that was just too esoteric for me and that i had to resort to looking up to pass. after getting perfect in all the regular quizzes, an additional hard mode is unlocked with additional quizzes. the quizzes were surprisingly fun and addictive, although with obvious limited appeal in terms of both audience and longevity. the app includes all the other features of the original, including AR features, search options, and pretty much all the details you could want to know about the li’l critters. like the original, this functions as a slightly more-portable and attractive reference than a complete bulbapedia wiki page (albeit with less information) and pro players prob. already have all this info memorized anyway, but as a fairly loyal pokemon fan this was a decently worthwhile purchase for me for $5 off, if just to play through the animations of my favorites, although i doubt i would’ve bought it for the full $15. still, for a minimum of a few hours’ entertainment you could do a lot worse, and legions of pokemon fans have probably already fully appreciated this app and justified its creation.

for my first game of 2013 i finally finished up pokemon black for DS. although the critics generally seemed to be excited about the newest edition, i’ve taken a much more skeptical view of the amount that the series evolves between releases, and so my expectations weren’t too high. although i did like the fact that they created a whole new roster of 150+ pokemon for the main part of the game, many times the differences felt fairly minor. does it really matter if the bats in the caves are swoobats rather than zubats or that instead of geodudes there are boldores? but there were enough new type combinations (such as joltik, a new bug + lightning type) that it did feel like the designers were making an effort to expand the universe.

another area that people praised was the more-serious story of a crusader trying to free all pokemon from their enslavement. maybe i just didn’t take it seriously enough, but this new type of story didn’t draw me in at all and it didn’t feel much better than the usual “team rocket wants to take over the world” storylines. also among the main new features were the 3-on-3 battles and the rotation battles. these did help shake things up a bit, but they didn’t happen that often and so didn’t force you to focus on designing your team for those types of battle. which was fine by me, since i usually just create a team and stick with it through to the end.

the graphics are better than diamond and pearl (and features a lot of nice 3-D environments that will look great when the inevitable 3DS iteration of the series arrives), particularly in the battles which feel more dynamic due to the pokemon being slightly animated. the battles themselves are noticeably faster-paced than its predecessors with minimal time between messages. one major annoyance (spoiler alert) is the fact that to win the title of pokemon champion you have to battle the elite 4 twice, once to end the first part of the game, and the other after the last 1/3 of the map has opened up. i’d actually beaten the elite 4 the first time a couple of months ago but was really disheartened at having to keep playing to really call the game finished. there’s still a lot to do, though, and the last part of the game goes by without too much tedium. there’s a sidequest to track down the six sages (although it’s somewhat of a let-down that you don’t get anything for doing so, other than TMs), and there are a lot of high-level trainers to go up against, including cynthia (the champion from diamond and pearl) herself.

[geeky aside: for those interested, my final 5 consisted of conkeldurr, serperior, chandelure, vanilluxe, and garbodor. the three who had second abilities all didn’t have my choice (e.g. conkeldurr had guts instead of sheer force), and oftentimes their natures didn’t help much either. serperior was as solid as you’d expect a starter to be, and conkeldurr ended up being a key player with its high physical attacks and HP. garbodor and chandelure were pretty solid, although vanilluxe was fairly weak and had terrible defense.]

another annoyance was that to “see” all 154 pokemon (152 plus victini and keldeo) of the unova pokedex you have to jump through some hoops, namely: train a couple of the pokemon yourself (namely to evolve ferroseed to ferrothorn and deino to zweilous) since you never see a trainer who has them, hatch one (rufflet from breeding a braviary, who you have to get in a trade from pokemon white), and trade several others, although you can do so over wi-fi since they appear within the game (including zorua/zoroark, who was only available as an event pokemon). the most annoying part of completing your unova pokedex is that to catch the final legendary, landorus, you have to have a legendary from the other game of the pair (thundurus or tornadus). luckily i had a used copy of pokemon white that i was able to exploit, but this would be a much bigger problem for people who didn’t and didn’t want to play through the game twice. anyway, this helped me get high enough to beat alder and become the champion, so i guess i can’t complain too much that finishing seeing all the pokemon takes more effort than it did in D/P.

one other annoyance is that pokemon white has an advantage over black b/c the unique area it includes (the white forest vs. black’s city) has pokemon you can catch in it, whereas there are no wild pokemon in the black city. this seems unfair to owners of pokemon black, and i haven’t seen any advantage that black has over white that would counterbalance it.

despite my complaints, this was a perfectly fine, if not revolutionary, entry in the series. what really made the game more enjoyable, though, were the accompanying “games” that enhanced the experience. although the pokemon games have had spin-offs since the game boy color days and the pokemon global terminal website was created to complement D/P, the pokemon global link and pokedex 3D felt fresh. the former provides the same ability as the global terminal did to see trades and various useless stats such as the country that spends the most time fishing in the games, but the global link is much more integrated into the games themselves.

the global link’s dream world provides a way to catch older-generation pokemon from early on in the game with unique abilities (via generally entertaining minigames), and also moves the berry-planting and secret base features out of the games and into the website. this actually turns out to be a great design decision since you can focus your game-playing time on exploring the game world and your time away from your game with more casual activities (well, relatively speaking anyway), and plus you can send items from the dream world back to your game as well. the game developers have tied decorating your house with the number of berries you’ve harvested, and collecting all the different types of berries via trades in the dream world is a fun diversion. i’ve gotten somewhat addicted to collecting all the available pokemon dolls (as you can see in the out-of-date screenshot of my dream world house).

pokedex 3D is less “essential”, but also makes for a very nice diversion. athough the info on evolutions, movesets, and move descriptions, can all be found online, it’s great to see the pokemon in 3D instead of as sprites (previously only seen on console games such as stadium and colosseum and the cartoons), not to mention actual 3D via the 3DS’s unique glasses-free feature. the app tried to play up the trading aspect of pokemon in order to unlock more of your pokedex, but it was more of an inconvenience than an enjoyable task. the app also tried to play up its AR aspects, which i mostly ignored for the same reasons that i ignored the character and mii features of AR games. but in general this was a nice complement to the black and white games: even though it was free it would’ve been worth a few bucks at least. i don’t think i have the need to shell out $15 for the pro version, that features all the pokemon, but knowing me i’m sure i will eventually.

i seem to be saying this a lot, but all in all gen V of pokemon wasn’t revolutionary but had just enough that was new (particularly in its two complementing games) to make it worthwhile. i have zero interest in playing their “sequels” black 2 and white 2 since despite claims they still seem to be more remix than evolution, but hopefully the next generation will actually offer something truly new. hopefully!

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it’s only been a few months since i’d put aside pokemon pearl in disgust even though i was only at the halfway point, but i ended up getting sucked back into it and spending way too much time finishing the game recently instead of progressing through pokemon black which i’d also started. the main reason was because my nephew, who has soulsilver, really wanted to trade and battle, and i didn’t have any new critters to trade with him. so being the nice uncle i am i spent a lot more time with the game and wound up exploring features of the series that i usually don’t pay much attention to, including breeding, the safari zone, and online trades. i spent way too much time tending to my honey trees (but after days and days of regular checking twice a day with still no munchlax in sight i gave up on trying to catch one), and i actually saw all 150 of the pokemon in the regional pokedex, a first for me for the series but no doubt made easier by the game itself which requires that achievement before you can import pokemon from the GBA games. completing the regional pokedex became a mini-obsession and i definitely made good progress, although i got to a point where i had to level up too many pokemon that you can’t catch in the wild and my interest waned.

as for the other features i hadn’t previously explored in this game, i checked out the underground in order to find fossils, but as i suspected it seems otherwise completely pointless unless you’re really into building up your secret base (although the multiplayer might be worth trying). i caught all three of the legendary pokemon trio in this game, including the roaming one (also a first for me for the series). in a wi-fi trade i encountered pokerus, the pokemon virus, for the first time, although i still have yet to see my first shiny pokemon (although i saw one listed in a trade). i checked out the battle zone, the post-game pokemon stadium/colosseum-esque area, but didn’t find it to be too interesting, and although i enjoyed playing around with swarms, the poke radar, and the dual-slot mode, trying to complete the national pokedex just seems like an endeavor way beyond my level of interest.

although i came to appreciate pokemon pearl for all that it packs into one tiny cartridge, overall i still felt the same way as i had previously, which is that it, particularly the platinum version, feels like the summation of the series begun with the original pokemon red/blue but that it doesn’t add much that really feels fresh and new. pokemon black/white seems like an attempt to revitalize the series and actually strips away some features instead of adding them. my verdict is still out on that game, but so far i’ve definitely been enjoying it.

to end, as is my custom i’ll give a shout-out to my final crew. yet again it seems that steel pokemon can do no wrong, and bronzong was completely solid, even more so than the starter empoleon. roserade was pretty decent, although rapidash wasn’t a star player. even levelled up, blissey was fairly weak and useless, and it’s going to be a while before i feel motivated to use a normal-type pokemon again.

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one more handheld game before i finish up the console games i’ve been chipping away at. late last year i played through pokemon ruby, and even at that time i had been skeptical that its follow-up, diamond/pearl on DS, would be able to add anything significantly new. after finishing more than half of pearl i have to say that for me at least the answer is a resounding no. as evidenced by my previous posts i consider myself to be a fairly avid pokemon fan in general, but this latest iteration is disappointing to me on so many levels. for one, although the game adds 100+ new critters, many of them are additional forms of previous pokemon and the amount of old pokemon used is just way too much. i know i can’t be the only one who’s sick of battling @#$% geodudes and zubats. and even among the new pokemon i didn’t find much to interest me (did we really need another cute electric rodent?). the visuals are little better than the graphics of the GBA games, and there aren’t any important new gameplay elements to make me feel that this was any improvement upon the previous generation. the elements that have been expanded, most of which were introduced in ruby and sapphire, are all the parts of the game that i’m the least interested in, namely, contests, secret bases, berries, and the game post-win. the one part of the game that could’ve been more worthwhile was the global trading network, but based on my cursory look at it, it seems like it’s just not worth the bother of trying to find a fair trade. the accompanying website could have been interesting, but it closed a year ago and no site has been created to take its place.

all in all, it’s only based on the strength of the core pokemon gameplay that i managed to bring myself to play half of pearl. part of the problem may be that i played three generations of pokemon games, originally released over a span of 7 years, in only a year and a half. but comparing the generation III and generation IV games side by side shows that there was a significant drop in innovation, so much so that i would have to rank this as easily my least favorite pokemon game yet. i’m wary of tackling pokemon black/white any time soon, but given that it features 150 completely new pokemon and completely new graphics i’m cautiously optimistic.